


Nothing To Hide

by pajamaprodigy



Category: Monster (Manga)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hospitalization, Post-Canon, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-24
Updated: 2017-06-24
Packaged: 2018-11-18 08:42:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11287710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pajamaprodigy/pseuds/pajamaprodigy
Summary: Johan returns to where he first met Tenma and reflects on his life.





	Nothing To Hide

An open window where the breeze came in. Fluorescent lights. Pale speckled linoleum tile. Monitors on the wall behind him, an ECG pad on his arm. Solitude. A light and scratchy blanket.

He knew how to keep himself still, his eyes almost closed. 

The footfalls of nurses – the doctors came only rarely. The creak of the gurney they used to move patients coming closer and then fading away in the hall. The light cast by the monitors across the ceiling at night. Rough and poorly fitting hospital socks.

Anna came, and so did Tenma. They came separately and left separately and came back and came back and the pattern to Anna’s coming changed and grew to be more like Tenma’s, which was indecipherable at first. Tenma talked and he wanted to answer but he had to lay still, perfectly still, his eyes almost closed, flitting back and forth beneath the lids as if there were nothing he wanted to look at, as if he could want nothing, as if his bed were not right next to an open window where the breeze came in, blowing the rough and threadbare curtain aside. 

He couldn’t watch them but he could hear them and he could remember when they came and when they left, when they went behind the curtain to the left of his bed, between the bed and the door. He knew how to count time with his own steady breaths / he couldn’t see the clock from where he lay but he could keep time, lie in wait. 

The chill that came after a sponge bath, when the nurse who dried him missed a drip, and he couldn’t shiver or fix it himself and he had to stay so still, hiding, hiding like he had since childhood, hiding like prey, hiding like he wanted to. Hiding like Anna or maybe like himself: he wasn’t sure after what Tenma and Anna had told him again and again. 

The window that stayed open from May through August, except on Thursdays when the nurse with glasses closed it at nights. 

Hiding in a body, in a hospital, in a prison, in a closet, in a back room in the three frogs, in the red rose mansion, in a shed on a hill, in a hospital room, in a cupboard under a sink, in the folds of a mother’s skirt, in a human body, in a mass of human bodies, in a womb where he couldn’t hide from her. 

Hiding behind certainty, behind the possibility of a mistake. One of them might be worse.

The curtain on the open window where the breeze came in was so thin: that curtain hid nothing. It had nothing to hide. 

The nurse’s footsteps, followed by the shut of the door. Somewhere between eight hundred and forty breaths (in and out) and nine hundred. Tenma had visited earlier that day.

The window was low to the ground so he only had to push himself up on the radiator, slowly lift his atrophied legs to the sill and. The window was open of course. His breathing was no longer a steady clock, but it would be quick and easy, just like always, just like always it would be only a moment and it wouldn’t be hard at all. 

He saved peeling off the electrode pads for last. The IV sent out no signals so he removed that . He had to lift his legs out the window one by one. Quickly now, he was almost finished. 

An open window where the breeze came in to move the curtain. The imprint on the pillow in the shape of his head; it was now much farther from the window, dark blood oozing along the concrete below.

**Author's Note:**

> Anyway this was how I interpreted the ending of Monster; I was actually kind of surprised there was so much debate about it. I wrote this on a whim lmao


End file.
